Friday, December 6, 2013

Alice Through the Looking Glass

One of the larger projects I worked on a while back that
I’ve not blogged about is based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
(1871). These stories are rich with fantastic description and lend themselves
to endless visual interpretations, which is evident in the countless versions
by illustrators, well known and not.

The first phase of the project was comprised of several
illustrations of scenes and characters from the books. A few initial sketches:

The final illustrations began with elements painted in
watercolor with added colored pencil on scraps of hot press paper:

These elements were scanned and brought into Photoshop
where they were further refined then composited with scanned in textures,
handmade papers, and vintage graphic elements to create the final collages
(more examples available on my website):

When I first embarked on this series of illustrations, I had
assumed that they would be the end product. However, a few weeks later, I
enrolled in a children’s book illustration class and the possibility of experimenting with animation was tossed around.
As illustrators, no one in the class really had any serious previous
experience, but most of us were ready to dive in and teach ourselves how to set
our art in motion using After Effects. I
decided to revisit the Alice series as my subject.

Roughly, I spent about five weeks going through tutorials on
lynda.com to learn the software. Meanwhile, I painted more components for some of the scenes I had in the back of
my mind, and created an accompanying series of postcards:

Once several of these were done, I plunged into creating the
“film.” Instead of planning the entire project and making a storyboard, as is
standard practice, I began with a rough idea of a few short scenes or vignettes
based loosely on the stories, and the project grew organically as I strung the
scenes together. Rather than try to deal with dialogue and mouth-syncing in this
initial effort, I made it a silent movie with title cards. The soundtrack is an
early 1930s recording of Argentinian tango music I happened to stumble on.

Little did I know how addictive digital animation would be.
I did know it was a lot of work and very time consuming, but I didn’t mind, and
I was determined to learn as much as I could within a few weeks. Working on it
a few hours daily, I spent about five weeks total to create an animation that
is just under three and a half minutes in length (click image to view animation):